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the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Tokyo, 2007.12.04

I've been working on a novel for several years. One of the things that's amazed me at times is how bad the most of the word processors I've tried to use have been. Along the way, I've tried MS Word, WordPerfect, ABIWord, OpenOffice Writer, the "WordPad" tool that comes with Windows, and a few others that I've forgotten.

They all had one aggravating shared feature: instability. All of them -- even WordPad, which by now means stretches the envelope when it comes to features (actually, scratch that, it barely explores the possibilities of the RTF format, the only option you've got) -- have seized up on me at one point or another. This causes lost work, lost time, and unnecessary frustration. It can all to easily also lead to document corruption**. A downloaded demo of WordPerfect 8 was perhaps the most memorably unstable, but ABIword joined WordPerfect in being unable to go a day without a crash necessitating a reboot.

At one point I gave up on any of them and switched to vim, but while vim is all you need for command-line editting, it leaves a lot to be desired for novel-length manuscripts. I eventually found myself moving back to Windows applications.

And then by happy chance I came upon one of those "best freeware" lists on the net and found reference to the Atlantis Nova word processor.

I've been using nothing else since. Nova is a limited-functionality free version and is now a little old. Among other limitations it can only work with the RTF format. But as I'd long before settled on RTF due to the inherent bulk and difficulty involved with Microsoft's ".doc" format, it was never a problem. In fact, Atlantis allows you to strip out all of the redundant crap that editors like WordPad put into an RTF document (let alone MS Word, I honestly have no idea why anyone uses that treacherous software -- I uninstalled it after I left the job that had allowed me to use it at home). The "Nova" version also doesn't have a spell checker, but it's got everything else I need to actually write.

Especially stability. And documents free of any sort of corruption.

So, way to go Atlantis. And guys? Bring back an updated version of the free Nova version!

*I'd actually go as far as to say that any MS Word document is inherently corrupted. Ever tried playing with the formatting of a Word document? You'll have experienced the sudden, inexplicable changes and inconsistencies that can happen even with two-page documents made from scratch. All of these result in permanent insertions of unnecessary dross into your document that adds bloat and reduces the stability. I could go on at great length about MS Word's deficiencies, but I'd never sum it all up so maybe I won't bother.

rand()m quote

One day you will take a fork in the road, and you're going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go. If you go one way, you can be somebody. You will have to make compromises and you will have to turn your back on your friends. But you will be a member of the club and you will get promoted and get good assignments. Or you can go the other way and you can do something [...] for yourself. If you decide to do something, you may not get promoted and get good assignments and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors. But you won't have to compromise yourself. To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That's when you have to make a decision. To be or to do.

—John Boyd, US Air Force